Angels of Mercy in our Midst
Winnifred Ethel Hardy
(1892-1978)
Courtesy of Robert McBain collection, Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Winnifred Ethel Hardy was born in the former Mariposa Township on June 16th 1892 (though some sources suggest that she was born three years prior to this, in 1889). The second-oldest of seven children born to George and Elizabeth Hardy, Winnifred was raised on a farm located roughly in the area of Lot 6, Concession 11, halfway between Peniel Road and Quaker Road on what is now County Road 46. Many years later, Winnifred’s brother, Robert, wrote that the community was “roughly four miles square, centred on the Peniel Church.”
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Emily and Winnifred Hardy
Letters from Winnifred during her sojourn overseas describe “…the eagerness of Australian soldiers as they tumbled out of bed to see the snow;” a Christmas party she and her fellow Nursing Sisters organized for patients in the hospital ward; and of how her “…thoughts often wander to dear old Peniel and its people.” On May 19th 1918, No. 1 Canadian General Hospital was bombarded by German aircraft, killing nearly seventy Canadians. “The raid lasted almost two hours,” Winnifred wrote to her parents a week later, “a length of time most unusual for such an attack. Then we went up to the operating room and in all my experience of war surgery I have never seen such wounds. However, it’s all over now and one tries to forget it.”
In due course, Winnifred would move into Lindsay, where at the Ross Memorial Hospital she would train to be a nurse. On June 9th, 1916, Winnifred and seven other aspiring nurses graduated from their three years’ worth of training, the ceremony taking place in what is now called the Academy Theatre. The following day, Miss Hardy enlisted as a member of the Canadian Army Medical Corps in Kingston, Ontario. Within a month, she had been “taken on strength” as a Nursing Sister, and was assigned to No. 1 Canadian General Hospital in France.
Courtesy of Robert McBain collection,
Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Winnifred went on to work at the Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital in Toronto, and later, at what is now Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Contrary to her letters, which reveal a Winnifred who yearned to be back in Peniel, her nephew, Robert McBain, tells a different story. “Aunt Win and my mother hated the farm so much that in all my travels to visit relatives in the area I never saw the farm.” Winnifred married Samuel Lee Honey (1890-1975) in 1924, and resided in southern Ontario for much of her later life, passing in Toronto in 1978, at the age of eighty-six.
Resources:
Hardy, Robert. Recollections. (Hardy, 1983), Pg. 5
“Impressive Graduation Exercises At Academy Tuesday Evening,” Lindsay Post, June 9 1916, Pg. 2
Hardy, Winnifred. Letter
“Nurse Hardy Tells of Bombing by Huns,” Lindsay Post, June 1918
Robert McBain, email message to author, December 3 2015
